www.simsforums.com - the Sims series, computer games & other nonsense since March 2008.

One of Trumpy's first acts was to remove the climate change page from the government website apparently. We are all doomed. What strange times we live in.

Perhaps it is best to move cautiously from one weekend to the next. Certainly I am living sweetroll to sweetroll.

Last Saturday I went on the Women's March, although it was less of a march and more of a stand still, followed by slow shuffle. This was due to the massive turnout. And yes, I realise that these things often don't result in anything other than a feel good factor for the participants, but if the large turnout upsets Trump and made a few million people feel a bit better that day, then I'd say it was worth it. Nice day for a walk anyhow.

Meanwhile my project to move country goes on, almost matching the pace of the march. Hopefully some plausible jobs will be advertised soon, so I can get to the shuffle stage.

I hope the Moms in Mexico are having a fine time!

How were those sweetrolls, Caspin? Currently reading some Anne Perry and looking out at the incredibly grey, raw day. I had to buy the beastie some cat food and I had to get the super-huge size because they didn't have the normal size. She only gets this dry cat food at 10 at night just to tide her over so the bag lasts weeks longer than normal.
Still, it is kinda annoying to have to lug that monster home for my little monster. I've been debating taking up volunteering for some of my evenings. Went on a tour of the WHS last night just in case I want to become a volunteer there. Just saying there is no way in Satan's left buttcheek that I will be part of animal intake. That's where animals are surrendered to the Humane Society. Just the thought that I will eventually see an abused animal makes me want to find its abuser and flay them alive. So yeah, that ain't happening.
So what about you guys? Ever done any volunteering?

(28-01-2017 08:11 PM)simspeaker4 Wrote: [ -> ]How were those sweetrolls, Caspin? Currently reading some Anne Perry and looking out at the incredibly grey, raw day.

I had to buy the beastie some cat food and I had to get the super-huge size because they didn't have the normal size. She only gets this dry cat food at 10 at night just to tide her over so the bag lasts weeks longer than normal. Still, it is kinda annoying to have to lug that monster home for my little monster.

I've been debating taking up volunteering for some of my evenings. Went on a tour of the WHS last night just in case I want to become a volunteer there. Just saying there is no way in Satan's left buttcheek that I will be part of animal intake. That's where animals are surrendered to the Humane Society. Just the thought that I will eventually see an abused animal makes me want to find its abuser and flay them alive. So yeah, that ain't happening.
So what about you guys? Ever done any volunteering?

Anne Perry, eh? Ever watched "Heavenly Creatures"?

I used to be the secretary for the local branch of Amnesty International. Complete waste of time & was left very disillusioned. Each branch was given a "case" to work on with addresses to write to (usually some Ministry of The Interior or justice department). They worked because they got their supporters to fudge up the postal services of some third world country by sending them more letters than they could cope with so they'd be forced to let said prisoner go. Once the internet came along & snail mail became less of a big deal, I knew they were doomed.

The dumber branches would spend a fortune buying prepaid aerogrammes & letter cards with the Amnesty logo on the outside - they may as well have scrawled "THROW IN THE BIN!" on it as they saved their targets a lot of work having to open & read each one.

Things got fraught when they started wanting us to write on the behalf of people some of us wanted them to keep in jail & lose the key, in particular members of Shining Path in Peru, a Maoist terror group whose activities at times had more in common with Nazism than Marxism. AI were starting to move from being apolitical into another buckled leftie group where people in jail without trial or under sentence of death were deemed worthy or unworthy of AI's time according to their ideology rather than notions of justice.

What caused me to give it up in the end was a bunch of SNP activists infiltrated us en bloc seeing it as a way of raising their local profiles back in the days Labour won everything. They got themselves elected to be in charge of everything (bar being secretary, too much like hard work!) & meetings became them talking amongst one another rather than an actual group. Their ringleader was a primary school teacher who I guess chose that career path as he had not a clue how to work with adults.

Matters came to a head after a "can rattle" fund raiser outside the local shops one Saturday morning & instead of heading back to the local church (who let us use their rooms for our meetings for free) to get it all counted, bagged & banked before they closed, they said to bring the cans back to the next meeting.

Come the next meeting, not everyone turned up who had been on the can rattle (surprise!), & I was the only one that had bothered beforehand to open my tin, get the money bagged according to denominations & totalled. Miss Primary Teacher decreed the money was poured into one big heap on the floor to be counted there & then, a complete waste of a branch meeting's time & allowing anyone that may have opened up their tin & taken a "skin" from it for themselves (or for a certain political party) to go undetected (everyone had finished the day with a full tin).

Weeks later I got pulled up by some LibDem newbie (they were now at it as well) & asked about when the next branch elections were. "You want to be Secretary? Here, it's all yours" I said, passing her my contacts folder & being glad to walk away from it. I bumped into someone I knew from the Flip Flip party weeks later & it turned out her political colleague lasted only a few weeks before chucking it for much the same reasons & said branch had been begging in the local rags for new members (wonder why!). Before that year was out, my old AI branch was "merged" with the local jumped up polytechnic "new Uni" branch (ie. folded).

I've never heard of 'Heavenly Creatures', Minty. Is it good? On the literary front I've started reading a book with a pretty polarizing title. It's Owen Jones' 'Chavs; the demonization of the working class'. It has been suggested that there is a difference between Waitrose and Sainsbury. Aren't all supermarkets pretty similar? Is it just the clientele that's different? I understand that Tesco is close to the bottom of the supermarket food chain but I could be wrong.
Meanwhile, I'm reading this book and it kinda sickens me what one finds in the letters to the editor in 'Daily Mail'. It's like the middle class has it in for the working class for some reason. The Sun seems more likely to defend the working class but the Sun isn't supposedly known for quality. They suppored Sky Television in the early days after all as a Murdoch stooge. Please correct me if I am completely off the mark on any or all things.
My cat's reminding me of the importance of eating food.

(31-01-2017 04:01 AM)simspeaker4 Wrote: [ -> ]I've never heard of 'Heavenly Creatures', Minty. Is it good?

Heavenly Creatures is the first major film by Peter Jackson & is the reason he got The Lord Of The Rings/The Hobbit films to do.

It's about Anne Perry back in the days when her name was Juliet Hulme. I won't tell you anything else, except to say if it wasn't for the incredible timing of this film & the public reaction to it, her career as an author possibly would have been finished.

(31-01-2017 04:01 AM)simspeaker4 Wrote: [ -> ]On the literary front I've started reading a book with a pretty polarizing title. It's Owen Jones' 'Chavs; the demonization of the working class'. It has been suggested that there is a difference between Waitrose and Sainsbury. Aren't all supermarkets pretty similar? Is it just the clientele that's different? I understand that Tesco is close to the bottom of the supermarket food chain but I could be wrong.

Waitrose along with Marks & Spencers are regarded as for the middle class. Complete rubbish: it's simply do you want food to fill you up or are you happy to eat less food but it tastes far nicer? If the latter, you go to Marks.

(31-01-2017 04:01 AM)simspeaker4 Wrote: [ -> ]Meanwhile, I'm reading this book and it kinda sickens me what one finds in the letters to the editor in 'Daily Mail'. It's like the middle class has it in for the working class for some reason. The Sun seems more likely to defend the working class but the Sun isn't supposedly known for quality. They suppored Sky Television in the early days after all as a Murdoch stooge. Please correct me if I am completely off the mark on any or all things.
My cat's reminding me of the importance of eating food.

The Daily Mail is often demonised (rightly) as The Sun for the middle classes, but they were the ones who ensured the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence (killed for being black) was brought to court against the police's wishes.

Whilst Britain's buckled lefties carried out a series of virtue signalling events solving nothing, the Mail on St Valentine's Day 1997 (the day after the whitewash inquest) posted pictures of the five suspects with the headline "Murderers: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us." It was an incredible risk for any British newspaper to take - & at first it appeared they were going to be sued for libel, which would have closed the paper & probably saw its editor jailed.

But 15 years later, the two who committed the stabbings were finally jailed for life, thanks mainly due to the Mail being just about the only paper on the Met Police's back during all that time (the rest only cared once it looked they were going to win).

Sky TV & the Sun are both owned by Murdoch.

I'd take 'Chavs' with a pinch of salt. Yes, there's some demonisation of the working classes, but some of it is well deserved. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp grew up in the worst part of Sheffield & has always been scathing of middle class journalists romanticising the working classes as "noble savages". As he put it, where he grew up there was no nobility but plenty of savagery!

Always best to take everything with a grain of salt. Makes life taste so much better.
Okay. Enough political and class talk. I've moved on to the dreary and depressing poetry of Baudelaire. The students I work with like to lambaste French as being more difficult than English. They were being goofy the other day over the issue of language having genders in French. In German there are three genders. I didn't think of it at the time but for all of French's gender and structure, it has pretty solid rules.
Compared to English, which changes at least once a decade, it seems.

The main trouble with French is the irregular verbs, which from memory appeared to outnumber the regular ones.

Baudelaire I'm not familiar with, sounds like he'd something to do with the inspiration behind "A Series of Unfortunate Events". Our own depressing poet was Phillip Larkin, who had a particularly cynical view of human nature such as "Talking in bed" & "This be the verse".

So say Philip Larkin and Barry Hines came together and wrote a screenplay. Ken Loach does the directing. Reece Dinsdale stars as a baker facing redundancy, domestic strife and nuclear war in Leeds. Call it 'Breads'.


Anyway, Baudelaire was part of that generation that liked opium a lot. His seminal book 'Flowers of Evil' was banned for a bit in Paris because of the poems were 'naughty' for that time.
On my literary back burner I have the bio of Thomas de Quincey (the original opium-eater) and some stories by Irvine (Trainspotting) Welsh. The book itself is called 'Ecstasy'. I've never actually read owt by the guy but considering how 'Trainspotting' went this should be interesting.
Oh, and Canada is supposed to have gotten a trade deal with Europe. We pull away kinda permanently in the 80s and now we're going back. Hmm.

Sorry for the lack of recent contributions - although I see you have been talking quietly amongst yourselves, so gold stars all round!

My every waking moment appears to be taken up either at work or else writing CVs and so on. Apparently writing about me is the most boring and frustrating task I could have set myself. But it must be done and thankfully I am now making some progress. Well, I have at least chosen a font.

I have also been spending time opening cupboards, staring at the contents thinking that I should get rid of some stuff so I don't have to pack it, then feeling overwhelmed and closing the cupboard. The drinks cupboard is emptying nicely, that's about all.

What did I miss? Personally I wouldn't use either the Sun or the Mail, or actually most UK newspapers, for anything other than picking up dog poo. Unfortunately some of my family use such trash as their main source of information about the world and are perfectly happy to absorb whatever the latest fad might be, as well as allowing all the hate and bile to prop up their own prejudices. It's depressing, but not much to be done about it. It's not as though we are blessed with large numbers of factually correct, balanced news sources these days.

French verbs, eh. I was generally quite bewildered when trying to learn French at school. Apparently I got an A at GCSE (see - the CV is useful for knowing these things!) but goodness knows how! I do remember the teacher telling us that we were in luck because a Scouse accent lends itself well to speaking French. This of course resulted in great hilarity and impossibly comic impressions of Allo Allo characters from all the class clowns. Despite all my best girly swot efforts, I could only really remember words for foods and insults, which resulted in a somewhat difficult time during the speaking test. Why oh why could the entire task not have involved ordering from a menu and then berating the waiter!?

Going to take a bit of a break today so hopefully might play some Sims, if I can remember how, or possibly start a new book. I went to a talk by historian Greg Jenner last year and bought his book so maybe I will dabble in that. I love Horrible Histories, which he writes, and apparently the book contains a lot of interesting material about the history of toilets. So that'll be ace.

Catch you later, lovely people.

Food and insults, Caspin? The two most important things to know in any language. Meanwhile, it's not the most fun to work on a CV. There are lots of websites that can give you tons of help to make your CV pop and look awesome. Just got to keep your spirits up and that drinks cabinet full. Reminds me of Chemical Wibs and her wine references.
Anyway, my mom's tyres are stuck on ice and just spin when she tries to go anywhere. I'm hoping I can help her get the car shifted and off the ice. If that doesn't work my sister and brother-in-law are going there for supper and maybe the three of us can help my mom out.
And now I'm reading about legendary poet and doper Thomas de Quincey. Irvine Welsh is a good writer as well. I finished reading 'Ecstasy' so maybe I should give 'Trainspotters' a go. I sense a theme here.